linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 1/9] mm, page_alloc: rip out ZONELIST_ORDER

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Date:   Fri, 14 Jul 2017 10:36:50 +0100
From:   Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
Cc:     linux-mm@...ck.org, Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>, linux-api@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/9] mm, page_alloc: rip out ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE

On Fri, Jul 14, 2017 at 09:59:58AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
> 
> Supporting zone ordered zonelists costs us just a lot of code while
> the usefulness is arguable if existent at all. Mel has already made
> node ordering default on 64b systems. 32b systems are still using
> ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE because it is considered better to fallback to
> a different NUMA node rather than consume precious lowmem zones.
> 
> This argument is, however, weaken by the fact that the memory reclaim
> has been reworked to be node rather than zone oriented. This means
> that lowmem requests have to skip over all highmem pages on LRUs already
> and so zone ordering doesn't save the reclaim time much. So the only
> advantage of the zone ordering is under a light memory pressure when
> highmem requests do not ever hit into lowmem zones and the lowmem
> pressure doesn't need to reclaim.
> 
> Considering that 32b NUMA systems are rather suboptimal already and
> it is generally advisable to use 64b kernel on such a HW I believe we
> should rather care about the code maintainability and just get rid of
> ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE altogether. Keep systcl in place and warn if
> somebody tries to set zone ordering either from kernel command line
> or the sysctl.
> 
> Cc: <linux-api@...r.kernel.org>
> Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
> index 80e4adb4c360..d9f4ea057e74 100644
> --- a/mm/page_alloc.c
> +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
> @@ -4864,40 +4824,22 @@ int numa_zonelist_order_handler(struct ctl_table *table, int write,
>  		void __user *buffer, size_t *length,
>  		loff_t *ppos)
>  {
> -	char saved_string[NUMA_ZONELIST_ORDER_LEN];
> +	char *str;
>  	int ret;
> -	static DEFINE_MUTEX(zl_order_mutex);
>  
> -	mutex_lock(&zl_order_mutex);
> -	if (write) {
> -		if (strlen((char *)table->data) >= NUMA_ZONELIST_ORDER_LEN) {
> -			ret = -EINVAL;
> -			goto out;
> -		}
> -		strcpy(saved_string, (char *)table->data);
> +	if (!write) {
> +		int len = sizeof("Default");
> +		if (copy_to_user(buffer, "Default", len))
> +			return -EFAULT;
> +		return len;
>  	}

That should to be "default" because the original code would have the proc
entry display "default" unless it was set at runtime. Pretty weird I
know but it's always possible someone is parsing the original default
and not handling it properly.

Otherwise I think we're way past the point where large memory 32-bit
NUMA machines are a thing so

Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs